Ornamental Wrought Iron Work 
AN ENTRANCE TO THE PARK MONCEAU, PARIS 
Germany has always had a sympathy 
for and great productiveness in ornamental 
iron work, and was the birthplace of the 
Gothic and kindred styles, principally swaged 
work of bar iron interlaced and mortised; 
the now almost universal use of rivets coming 
at a later era. This work claims our admira¬ 
tion from the exuberance of invention dis¬ 
played in its design and the gracefulness and 
lightness of detail. In spite of the improve¬ 
ments in tools and mechanical methods we 
see no way to-day of reproducing such work 
except by infinitely slow, careful hand-work. 
Labor was cheap and time a minor considera¬ 
tion in those days. Later, as we see in the 
extraordinarily rich examples at Nuremberg, 
the tendency grew to greater elaboration, 
becoming again simplified and subdued under 
the influence of the French eighteenth cen¬ 
tury style. The German Renaissance, mov¬ 
ing along somewhat similar lines, culminated 
in the rather florid baroque and rococo work 
of which good specimens are seen at Wurz¬ 
burg. At the close of the eighteenth and the 
beginning of the nineteenth century, German 
iron work became rather heavy and ignoble in 
design as was the general Teutonic architec¬ 
tural tendency at that period. Berlin, Mu¬ 
nich and Dresden are full of such examples. 
The close of the nineteenth century in 
Europe was signalized by a remarkable 
change of motive. For sometime the iron work 
executed had been mere tame copies, lacking 
all the inspiration of the originals and exag¬ 
gerating their defects. By a natural reflex 
a new school has sprung up whose eager 
strivings after originality at times degenerates 
to the grotesque. 
3 l6 
